Recommended Reading

Alternatives to Youth Prisons

What Justice Requires: Closing Youth Prisons (Center for Public Justice, 2017): This report highlights the issues with youth prisons and calls for closure and investment in restorative community based solutions. http://www.sharedjustice.org/youthprisons/

The Future of Youth Justice: A Community-Based Alternative to the Youth Prison Model (Patrick McCarthy, Vincent Schiraldi, and Miriam Shark, 2016): This report delivers a clear and compelling call to close youth prisons. It also introduces readers to an alternate model — rooted in a continuum of community-based programs — that aims to set all children on a pathway to success. http://www.aecf.org/m/resourcedoc/NIJ-The_Future_of_Youth_Justice-10.21.16.pdf

Beyond Bars: Keeping Young People Safe at Home and Out of Youth Prisons (National Collaboration for Youth, 2016): The report serves as a handbook for juvenile justice administrators, legislators, judges, the non-profit community and youth advocates for how to end the practice of youth incarceration, promote public safety and restore a sense of belonging for young people in their homes and neighborhoods. http://www.collab4youth.org/news?id=737

Safely Home (Youth Advocate Program, Inc., 2014): Instead of spending billions each year on incarcerating youth, this report calls on state and city policymakers to redirect taxpayers’ dollars to less expensive, more effective community programs that improve public safety by better supporting youth and their families and keep youth close to home. http://www.safelyhomecampaign.org/Portals/0/Documents/Safely Home Preview/safelyhome.pdf?ver=2.0

Maltreatment of Youth in U.S. Juvenile Correctional Facilities (AECF, 2015): An update to the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s 2011 report, No Place for Kids. This update highlights the continued abuse of youth in facilities. http://www.aecf.org/m/resourcedoc/aecf-maltreatmentyouthuscorrections-2015.pdf

Burning Down the House (Nell Bernstein, 2014): Bernstein introduces us to youth who have suffered violence and psychological torture at the hands of the state. http://www.nellbernstein.com

No Place for Kids (Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2011): Showed that heavy reliance on correctional confinement exposes incarcerated youth to widespread maltreatment; results in alarming levels of recidivism; incarcerates children who do not pose significant threats to public safety and ignores the emergence of treatment models that produce better outcomes. This report identified 52 lawsuits since 1970 that resulted in a court-sanctioned remedy in response to allegations of systemic problems with violence, physical or sexual abuse by facility staff and/or excessive use of isolation or physical restraints. http://www.aecf.org/resources/no-place-for-kids-full-report/

Debtors’ Prison for Kids? The High Cost of Fines and Fees in the Juvenile Justice System (Juvenile Law Center, 2016): Juvenile Law Center analyzed state laws in all 50 states and the District of Columbia that provide for the imposition of juvenile court costs, fines, fees, or restitution on youth or their families. Juvenile Law Center also surveyed professionals in each state familiar with how those fees were being imposed. A concurrent research study was also conducted to measure the connection between costs, recidivism and racial disparities in the juvenile justice system. http://jlc.org/news-room/press-releases/new-national-report-shows-rise-debtors%E2%80%99-prison-kids-implications-racial-dis

Juvenile Incarceration, Human Capital and Future Crime: Evidence from Randomly-Assigned Judges (Anna Aizer and Joseph Doyle, Jr., 2013): This report shows that estimates based on over 35,000 youth offenders over a ten-year period from a large urban county in the US suggest that juvenile incarceration results in large decreases in the likelihood of high school completion and large increases in the likelihood of adult incarceration. http://www.mit.edu/~jjdoyle/aizer_doyle_judges_06242013.pdf

Understanding the Risk Principle: How and Why Correctional Interventions Can Harm Low-Risk Offenders (Christopher Lowenkamp and Edward Latessa, 2004): How intensive treatments and supervision lead to no effect or increased recidivism for low-risk offenders. https://www.uc.edu/content/dam/uc/ccjr/docs/articles/ticc04_final_complete.pdf

Declines in Youth Commitments and Facilities in the 21st Century (Sentencing Project, 2015) http://www.sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/Youth-Commitments-and-Facilities.pdf

System Change Strategies

Stakeholders’ Views on the Movement to Reduce Youth Incarceration (National Council on Crime & Delinquency, 2014): The National Council on Crime and Delinquency (NCCD) decided to seek the opinions of system stakeholders regarding the decline in youth incarceration. These stakeholders included advocates who successfully pressured their local systems to adopt reforms; most study participants work inside the system as judges, probation chiefs, probation officers, directors of child welfare agencies, elected officials, and district attorneys. http://nccdglobal.org/sites/default/files/publication_pdf/deincarceration-summary-report.pdf

Pioneers of Youth Justice Reform: Achieving System Change Using Resolution, Reinvestment, and Realignment Strategies (Douglas Evans, 2012): This report describes the history and implementation of the most well-known reform initiatives that draw upon one or more of listed mechanisms to achieve system change and it considers their impact on juvenile confinement at the state and local level. http://johnjayresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/rec20123.pdf

Resolution, Reinvestment, and Realignment: Three Strategies for Changing Juvenile Justice (Dr. Jeffrey Butts, 2011): This report reviews the history and development of these strategies and analyzes their impact on policy, practice, and public safety. https://jeffreybutts.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/rec201111.pdf

Unjust: How the Broken Juvenile and Criminal Justice Systems Fail LGBTQ Youth (Movement America Project and Center for American Progress, 2016): Examines how as many as 3.2 million LGBTQ youth are vulnerable to discrimination, profiling, and mistreatment in the juvenile and criminal justice systems. The report also explores the widespread causes of the overrepresentation and documents the disparate—and often exceedingly harsh—treatment of LGBT youth by law enforcement, courts and detention facilities. http://www.lgbtmap.org/criminal-justice-youth

Family Connection

Mothers at the Gate: How a Powerful Family Movement is Transforming the Juvenile Justice System (Nell Bernstein, Karen Dolan, Ebony Slaughter-Johnson, 2016) : This report reflects an initial effort to map a movement of family members — particularly mothers — that aims to challenge both the conditions in which their loved ones are held and the fact of mass incarceration itself, and to distill the shared wisdom of its leaders. http://www.ips-dc.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/k-dolan-mothers-at-the-gate-5.3.pdf

Double Charged (Youth Radio, 2014): In a yearlong investigation, Youth Radio tracked three new trends – teen GPS ankle monitoring, victim restitution and making parents pay for their kids’ jail time and probation. https://youthradio.org/news/article/double-charged/

FAMILY Comes First (Campaign for Youth Justice, 2013): FAMILY Comes First is a comprehensive analysis of current family engagement and family partnership practices in juvenile justice systems around the country. It provides needed tools and resources to practitioners to develop strong system-family partnerships in the juvenile justice system. http://www.campaignforyouthjustice.org/documents/finalfamily comes first executive summary_web.pdf

Families Unlocking Futures: Solutions to the Crisis in Juvenile Justice (Justice for Families, 2012): This report introduces the informed and heartfelt perspective of families, the parents, and other relatives who are uniquely affected by the systems that can determine the future of their children. http://www.justice4families.org/media/Families_Unlocking_FuturesFULLNOEMBARGO.pdf

Just Learning: The Imperative to Transform Juvenile Justice Systems Into Effective Educational Systems, A Study of Juvenile Justice Schools in the South and the Nation (Southern Education Fund, 2014) http://www.southerneducation.org/getattachment/cf39e156-5992-4050-bd03-fb34cc5bf7e3/Just-Learning.aspx

Sticker Shock: Calculating the Full Price Tag for Youth Incarceration (Justice Policy Institute, 2014): Analysis the cost of youth confinement in every state and provides recommendations on better uses of state funds. http://www.justicepolicy.org/uploads/justicepolicy/documents/sticker_shock_final_v2.pdf